[Buddha-l] women & , er, religion

[Richard Hayes]

On Jul 21, 2009, at 2:21 PM, Jayarava wrote:

>
> --- On Tue, 21/7/09, jkirk <jkirk at spro.net> wrote:
>
>> Does the FWBO ordain women?

We, the undersigned, must strenuously disagree with Jayarava here. As  
we understand Buddhist ordination, the FWBO does not ordain women at  
all. That is because it does not ordain ANYONE in the sense most  
Buddhists understand ordination. There are no bhikkhus or bhikkhunis  
who follow the vinaya in the FWBO. It is extremely misleading to call  
dharmachari(ni) initiation "ordination". It is, well, the word just  
used: initiation. In India they call the ceremony of becoming a  
dharmachari(ni) dīkṣā (diik.saa, for those who lack Unicode  
capabilities), which means any religious ceremony or investiture or  
initiation. Dharmacāridīkṣā is never called upasampadā.

Quakers, as is well known, have no ordained clergy. The view, however,  
is that everyone is qualified to be every bit as inspired and as  
accomplished as an ordained priest or minister. What some Quakers say  
is "It's not that Quakers have no clergy. Rather, it's that Quakers  
have no laity, for everyone who attends a Quaker meeting is ipso facto  
a minister." In a sense (but only in a limited sense), the same might  
be said of the FWBO. There are no ordained monks, but everyone is  
considered fully capable of effectively going for refuge. Initiation  
into the WBO is simply a recognition that one is committed to going  
for refuge and is seen as doing so by other people who have been  
initiated into the WBO. It is really not much different from becoming  
formally accepted as a member of a Quaker meeting through a minute at  
a business meeting.

Now that we've said all that, we guess we'll have to see whether the  
FWBO has excommunication. We may have just made ourselves eligible.  
(And yes, Quakers have excommunication. In the 1970s there was a  
strong movement in Philadelphia to excommunicate President Richard  
Nixon for his dramatic and persistent failures to adhere to the Quaker  
peace testimony. The Philadelphia initiative ultimately failed to gain  
enough traction to result in Nixon's excommunication from Quakerdom,  
as a result of which several people left the Quaker movement, saying  
they could not belong to any religious organization that would  
tolerate Nixon as a member in good standing.)

Dayamati Dharmachari (WBO)
and Richard Hayes (RSFQ)